Oooh to, ooh to be…the best things about being a Gooner!

It’s time to fly the flag, to stand up and be counted, to be unequivocally and shamelessly chauvinistic about all things Arsenal. Today, we fight for our pride!

I may be preaching to the choir on this one but a re-affirmation of all that the letters AFC stands for is long overdue.

History

We are the most successful club in London and the third most successful team in English football history. Herbert Chapman was our first visionary manager, introducing numbers on the back of players shirts for the first time, developing under-turf heating on his watch and creating new playing systems (the famous W-W) that are still relevant today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2010/oct/26/the-question-barcelona-reinventing-w-w

The way we won the league in ’89 has never been matched for excitement by any other league-winning club and the Graham years featured a back four that was so famous it inspired references in films!

And then we have the league and cup doubles in’71, ’98 and 2002, the league and FA cup double in ’93- the first time this was done, and we were the first team since Preston in 1888 to go an entire league season without losing.

Not only do we have an immense history of success, we also have a history of ‘firsts’ in innovation and changing the game that has inspired the whole of world football.

Kit

No team anywhere in the world has such an elegant kit. The red shirts and white sleeves have been copied but never bettered!

Financial Dealings

I don’t believe any club in world football has been entirely honourable in their financial dealings. That said, with the exception of the Graham Bung story, our club is world-renowned for its transparency in financial dealings and its unwillingness to get involved in the murkier transfer dealings. I believe that the owners of the club have always been keen to set the standard and operate as gentlemen. Long may it continue!

Scintillating football

Aside from Barcelona and the current Spanish national team- which current team can compare to the mighty Arsenal for attacking fluency? The oohs and aahs than emanate from the stadium and pubs across the country are testament to the “fantasy” of our players and the vision of our manager.

Amazing Youth system

We produce more first team top level footballers from our youth team than any other in the country. West Ham and Manchester United may feel they have a claim but neither have a next generation as promising as ours.

Beautiful stadium

The Mothership! The beautiful, curvaceous, state of the art arena which we now call our home. It needed to be to follow on from the uniqueness of Highbury.

Heroes

We all have our favourites and I’m not old enough to talk of the players from the 70s and early 80s. But there are so many! All teams have their heroes but does any team treat their heroes with such devotion? Two that strike a particular chord are Rocky whose song still echoes around the ground on most matchdays and Eduardo’s reception on scoring a late goal in our recent Champions League encounter with Shaktar. You wouldn’t want to play for any other club would you? If you hear our ex-players talking about Arsenal you would be forced to agree.

Villains

There’s just something about the way we treat our villains- from Totnum to Cashley. There is so much humour and banter and very little true bile. Yes we hate them, but we’re secure enough in our own identity not to take it to extremes. When you compare with the way the spuds treated Sol or West Ham and Millwall go for each other- it makes me proud to be a supporter of the greatest club the world has ever seen!

Post navigation

109 Responses to Oooh to, ooh to be…the best things about being a Gooner!

Thank You Carlito for a great start to the day. No one but us knows what it’s like to be an Arsenal fan.

There is one stick I want opposition fans to stop hitting us with, lack of atmosphere. It’s time to turn up the volume at the Grove, sounded like it was rocking despite the Beebs best efforts to have all the crowd mics turned up to listen to the Tractor Boys.

In the main Arsenal do things right, you can keep the silverware if it means we have to behave like Chavs and Citeh to win them.

As for spuds fans, well you’d expect them to be a bit jealous but sometimes I wonder what swamp they have just crawled out of.

Totally agree CarlitoII. I just posted this on another blog but it seems relevent to post it here as well.

We haven’t won a won a domestic trophy for five years and seem to get a fair load of stick for it.

So who has won all the 15 trophies up for grabs? Well they are spread across five teams.
Liverpool and Portsmouth, both who won the FA Cup once and the Spuds, winning a solitary Carling Cup. The other 12 have been cleaned up by Chelski and Manure.

So in effect there are 24 other Premier League clubs who also have not won anything over the last five years. Most have not won any of the big three for a far longer time than us.

So why do most pundits highlight Arsenals plight rather than other clubs. It’s not like we spend a fortune and are expected to win trophies. Wenger doesn’t overstate his case anymore than his manergerial rivals. We are not a team stacked with stars but perform as a balanced team, mostly. So why all the crap thrown our way?

Arsenal play a brand of football that should be admired not bemoaned and the English game is littered with so many ex Arsenal players who in many teams are stars. Wenger has introduced many ideas that are now commonplace in most clubs such as dietary control, specialised training and the youth academy.
We are not in any great financial trouble and we have a state of the art stadium and training ground to be proud of.
So why all the aggravation?

I’m not sure I know, xenophobia? jealousy? history? or just bloody mindedness?

Whatever the reason let’s hope we can give it right back to them this season. If not this year, I think we all know we are not far away.

With the imminent closure of the transfer window and the lack of centre-back arrival its a good job that we’ve put a run of results together and I can feel pretty relaxed about our team :)

Good points GiE about the mikeing (is that a word) up of the stadium on Tuesday night, I thought the atmosphere was really good and although there was a bit of shoooshing we didn’t really allow it to become quiet.

I love the fact that whatever spuds do they’re always the villains even if they take points off of the manks or chavs to help us win the title :)

Slightly off subject, the idea that Wilshere is the new Gazza as suggested by BR has been running around my head, this is not meant as a criticism of the suggestion; it’s just that I’ve been wondering if there might be a better comparison. The funny thing is that out of all the players who have played in England’s midfield I’m not sure that there is one. The alcohol thing has nothing to do with it and should not come into the equation; Wilshere seems as good as Gazza going forward but I expect Wilshere to be a far better defensive force. Hhmmmmm, no, I don’t think I can improve upon the idea that Wilshere is the new Gazza.

London, I think you are right and I would go further by saying that England has never had a midfielder of Jack’s type. He most reminds me of players in the current Spain team, and by saying that, I mean that I think Jack has the potential to be better than any other England midfielder

The key difference is that Xavi wouldn’t be able to play his game with Gerrard and Lennon on either side- where are the supporting cast? I have a feeling that Wilshere will disappoint in England colours until there are one or two others who can play keep ball, touch move touch move football with him. The young lad McEachran at Chelsea is showing promise to be such a player but remains far too callow for now.

Scholes is not bad Carlito and probably a better comparison than Gazza. If Wilshere becomes anywhere near as good as Scholes offensively then I think we may be in for a even bigger treat than any of us have dared to imagine because we know that he has the defensive side of his game in the bag and that is something that Scholes never got to grips with.

Afternoon all, Great post Carlito,
My admiration for AW is motivated by the knowledge that he has brought all the tradition and Class that is Arsenal together Wrapped it in football that is pure gold and transferred it Cart Blanche to his inspirational stadium

Excellent Carlito !!! I am proud of the fact that we have a recognised system and that we have refused to buy into the capitalist model that many others have.
The thing is looking at football objectively there is a finite number of ‘world class’ players available and only a handfull of clubs who can afford/want to pay the ridiculous fees they command. It is a fact that every super star known to man was a ‘nobody’ at some time. We have used our common sense, developed a DNA of future performance and chosen younger players on that basis.

I have scratched my head in the past wondering why we seem to always be questioned in ways that other teams are not . Thank god Richard ‘that is aresenal’s nth red card under Wenger’ Keys has gone

To other fans t probably seems like chest beating but we should rightly be proud of where we sit in modern football as this is just the start

I for one will observe with amusement how the spuds negotiate the improvement on their playing stadium whilst continuing to deliver on the pitch

Great point Sharkey. Wenger could have earned so much more money by moving to Real Madrid for example.

If all the spuds in all the world put their heads together they could not have come up with a more divisive way to undermine Arsenal than to suggest that Wenger is some how financially incentivised, by some kind of bonus scheme, for not buying players.

Great post Carlito. If only some others in the blogosphere had the sense of perspective that you display.

I am not jealous of any other fans. I never grudgingly wish I had ManUre’s trophy haul or Chavski’s money or Citeh’s enormous squad of enormously paid enormous egos.

But I reckon that most fans of other teams are secretly jealous of us. They look at Arsenal and see an club that oozes class through its very pores. As Carlito says, from the way we do business to the way we play football we are, quite simply, a cut above. And the others know it.

My memories also can’t be trusted dandan, as anyone in my family will attest to. I just remember watching games in the ’70s when Hudson and Currie were displaying a wonderful range of passing – really pulling the creative strings in their respective MFs.
They may well also have been lazy beggers who loved a pint and a fag, but I don’t remember that bit :)

Iron Man- I always thought it was the WM but then the guardian article I linked to called it the WW and I bowed to their greater readership! (because the Grauniad never mis-spell anything of course, silly me :-~ )

Dandan- I can see the Strachan comparison. I’m too young for the rest of the named being discussed :-( SS, is that “the other site” casting aspersions on our manager’s transfer dealings- I caught the end of a row on twitter about it. If so- “For Shame”

It is quite telling that since Sz has been in goal no one on the site has called for a new keeper. The whole thing is a great relief as I felt that the keeper question was really getting us all down. This is probably as obvious as writing grass is green but hey ho.

There is a really humorous chain of belief: Journo asks question, Wenger gives answer, journo translates it to mean what he wants it to mean, it appears on NewsNow and is gospel in blog world. This isn’t a dig at you RA, I am sure I have been as guilty as the next Arsenal fan of believing what I want to believe but it does make me chuckle.

Don’t want to bore you guys again. I was taken to hospital with mucho blue lights about 3 weeks ago. Ridiculous temperature, unable to sit up in bed, let alone stand up, without collapsing. Kicked out of l’hospital after 3 days, with unknown virus and confined to bed for most of the last fortnight. First time out today for 10 mins.

What a life saver my laptop has been to chat/read all the lovely Arsenal stuff with you guys on AA!!! :-)

Hi London – I think you’re absolutely right about journos asking a question, wanting the answer to be such snd such and telling it as gospel ….. I’ve just told Rasp and he’s really excited at the thought of AW saying it ….. bless :D

….. and AW did say before the start of the season that he didn’t know who his No1 keeper was so the bait was set for the trap then.

Still, he does seem to me to give confidence to the defence and several of us have in the past months pointed out that that was important. My heart was in my mouth the other night when he and Sagna clattered into each other – just our luck I was thinking :(

Re the ‘sterling work of your average journalist’. The Fabregas quotes about Rugby, were a complete set up. He was asked do you think Ipswich played like a rugby, side. To which he responded: I don’t know if it is long ball or it is a rugby kick but it worked for them. In England, a lot of teams play like that and it works for them, they create chances like that and it is their football. We just have to put the ball on the floor and try to play football.”

Now I can’t find the original question posted alongside the answer, or are we supposed to believe that an interviewer just held out a mic and said give us your thoughts.

But now Fabs ‘rugby accusation’ is ‘gospel’, and was even brought up by Lineker on BBC before this weeks game. Shocking.

They make clubs produce a list of 25 players eligible to play in the prem and then fine Blackpool £25k for selecting 8 they deem not good enough. Blackpol narrowly lost that game against Everton 3:2 which is probably as good a result their 11 from the previous game would have achieved. We made 8 changes against Wigan and drew – by the same thinking, we should also be fined. It’s complete nonsense.

I thought Jerome Thomas was playing pretty well at LW for them. I guess Carlos is going there to play as a striker then..??

Either way lets get a quick answer to the Vela conundrum. If the loan does for him even 50% of what its done for LJW then I’ll be a happy man.

I honestly don’t know how Arsene is going to keep so many great players happy in the medium to long term. Look how young our current midfield is and you still have to add Ramsey, Galindo and Aneke to it. There’s Vela, Afobe, Wellington and Miyaichi to be added to our forward line, Miquel and Bartley to our defence, and JET to our list of players who play anywhere (Eboue?).

All hail Arsene Wenger, laughing at large transfer fees since 1998, and making a mockery of the 25 man squad rule since summer 2010 !!!

I hear ya GG9, and I can deffo say the same about LG. But it really is just a complete madhouse these days.

Their ‘blog rules’ are a complete joke, and the way that they are arbitrarily applied is an even bigger joke. I was addicted to that site for quite a while, but now I only read it for its comedy value.